


The Road Trip

by PalmettoFoxDen



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Aaron's POV, Bonding, M/M, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-23 23:38:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13201029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PalmettoFoxDen/pseuds/PalmettoFoxDen
Summary: Andrew lets Neil take him on that road trip Neil wanted but he brings the rest of the monsters with them too. Aaron is reluctant to spend this much time crammed in the middle of the backseat of the car, tagging along on Andrew and Neil's romantic get away.





	The Road Trip

Aaron didn’t understand why Andrew had to drag them all on him and his boyfriend’s romantic get away anyway. He knew the way that he got talked into this damn road trip, but he didn’t know _why_ Andrew had talked him into it. He didn’t know why Andrew talked them all into it.

Getting Kevin away from the court had been a trick. Andrew promised away the rest of the summer when they got back to practice however hard Kevin wanted whenever Kevin wanted to get Kevin to leave the court behind for this stupid road trip.

Aaron had promised his presence on the trip long before Kevin. He’d promised it before he had even traded rooms and secretly started to feel like an outsider to the group with Neil taking his place. It had been part of his and Andrew’s new deal, negotiated in Betsy Dobson’s office. Aaron could see Katelyn, Andrew could see Neil, and Aaron had to prove he wasn’t straying too far by leaving Katelyn behind and coming on this monster road trip in the summer, the road trip they all knew they were only going on because Neil wanted to and Andrew gave Neil whatever he wanted. But they couldn't say that, lest Andrew hear it and get pissed.

Nicky had been the easy one to convince. It hadn't taken a single deal. Andrew had suggested the idea to him and Nicky had latched onto it as a family road trip. He’d even joined Andrew in trying to convince them all to agree to go. At least Nicky's attempts at convincing them had just been constant pestering. They were a lot less ominous than Andrew's simple ‘You're coming.’

Four hours in, Neil and Nicky were still hyped up for the trip. It figured that Neil was still excited. This was his damn trip they were all being dragged on and he got to sit in the passenger seat without Nicky and Kevin on either side of him, taking up his leg room and accidentally elbowing him in their excitement or annoyance over and over. Neil might actually get to drive if Andrew got tired before they found some place they (aka Neil or Andrew) wanted to stop. Aaron was stuck in the middle of the back for the whole trip because, as Nicky put it, he was tiny. Aaron had never hated being small so much in his entire life. He was not small enough for Nicky and Kevin to be taking up a quarter of his seat each on either side. Road trips were about driving and Aaron already didn't think he could take one more minute in this car without losing it.

At least Kevin was annoyed too, but Aaron didn't think he could take one more second of Kevin's constant complaints either. Andrew and Neil were completely ignoring him, so Kevin was complaining louder and louder right into Aaron's ear.

“We can't just drive around and stop wherever and expect to find a decent place to sleep,” Kevin argued for the hundredth time in the last twenty minutes.

“Oh, Kevin. Afraid you’ll catch bedbugs?” Andrew asked.

It was clearly not the response Kevin had been trying to pester out of Andrew. Judging by his facial expression, Kevin had not been afraid of that before now.

“Well, what if they don't have any rooms left?” Kevin asked after a short pause. “Or what if they don't have enough rooms left?”

That argument got Aaron's attention.

“I’m not sleeping in the same room as you and Neil,” he told his twin. “I don't need to know what goes on in your bed.”

“Fuck off,” Andrew retorted while Neil looked over his shoulder just to glare at Aaron.

Kevin tried again, “Or what if we can't even find a hotel? This car is too small for us all to sleep in.”

“No fucking shit,” Aaron agreed as he shoved Kevin's leg back out of his leg room _yet again_.

“Oh calm down,” Nicky insisted. “It's not like we're going to end up stranded in the desert in the middle of the night. Loosen up and have a little fun. It won’t kill you.”

Aaron didn't consider fun being stuck in a small car with four other people just waiting for Andrew or Neil’s whims to spare them from this moving hellhole.

“I don't _‘loosen up_ ’,” Kevin responded in a disgusted tone.

“We've all noticed,” Nicky retorted.

Apparently, Andrew was as sick of the bickering as Aaron was which would have been good news if he'd just made them shut up but, instead, he turned up his already loud music to an ear-bleeding volume to drown them out.

* * *

“There’s a candy store a few exits from here,” Neil pointed out from the passenger seat a couple days into the trip.

“So?” Andrew asked, without turning his head.

“You want to stop there,” Neil said in a matter-of-fact tone as if he were the voice of authority on what Andrew did and did not want. It irked Aaron. But then again, most things about this road trip irked Aaron.

“I want nothing,” Andrew retorted and for a moment, Aaron wondered how the hell Andrew and Neil’s dynamic worked when Andrew was such a closed book and somehow Neil knew how to get whatever reaction he wanted out of him. Then he decided it was better not to know.

Neil was smirking now, although Aaron could not fathom how Andrew’s response had triggered it.

Andrew didn’t need to look away from the road to sense the look on his face apparently since he continued staring straight ahead as he told Neil, “Stop looking at me like that.”

“ _I_ want to go there,” Neil insisted.

Aaron did not think that was really true. Neil wasn’t as bad as Kevin for complaining about their sugar intake, but he certainly could be incredibly condescending about his decision to avoid sugary drinks and sugary foods that were too sweet for him.

Neil didn’t want to go to the candy store. Neil still thought Andrew did, despite Andrew’s protesting. Maybe he was right. Aaron certainly never knew what Andrew wanted, but Neil seemed to have developed a knack for figuring it out.

“Fine,” Andrew said in an irritated tone as if Neil was forcing him to go somewhere truly terrible and not to a candy store where Andrew was probably going to load up on sugar.

When they came to the exit, Andrew turned when Neil told him it was time.

In the candy store, Aaron and Nicky stocked up on candy for their car ride. Andrew bought a whole bag of candy just for himself. Neil did not pick anything out for himself and just trailed behind Andrew throughout the store, watching him pick out candy and occasionally pointing something out to check if Andrew wanted it. Kevin looked like he was being prematurely aged by the entire thing as he followed Nicky around, trying to convince him to put some of the candy back. Apparently, Kevin thought Nicky would be an easier target to convince than Andrew, although it was Andrew who nearly bought out the store.

* * *

“Ooh, look,” Nicky said a few days later, like Andrew would be able to tell what he was pointing at in the backseat while he was driving. “Science museum. That sounds like your kind of thing. Huh, Aaron?”

Nicky was pointing at a roadside sign that listed off what could be found in a city they could get to if they took an exit in a few miles.

Aaron ignored the way Nicky's nudge on the shoulder knocked him into Kevin's arm and ignored the way Kevin nudged him back over. Aaron was already scowling at Nicky’s suggestion anyway. He didn't need Nicky pointing out things he might be interested when they all knew that this was still Andrew and Neil’s trip and it had become overwhelmingly apparent over the last week that they only stopped where Andrew and Neil wanted to stop. Aaron would rather maintain his dignity than ask to go somewhere and have his suggestion turned down.

So he muttered out, “Shut up, Nicky.”

The exit was coming soon. They were in the wrong lane. Just like Aaron had expected, there was no chance they were stopping to go to some science museum that would bore Andrew and Neil. Nicky should have never brought it up.

“I've been there before,” Neil said in a strange tone. Like it was somehow exciting to him. “The city I mean, not the museum.”

Andrew barely perceptibly turned his head just enough to glance at Neil.

“We could stop there,” Neil said and Aaron was beyond surprised. There must be something pretty great there that Neil wanted to go back to see if he was willing to make a stop somewhere only Aaron wanted to visit.

Andrew didn't visibly react. The only sign that he had heard Neil came when a few seconds later, he changed lanes without signalling, nearly getting them into a crash for the tenth time that day.

* * *

Surprisingly, there didn’t seem to be anything in particular that Neil wanted to see in this city. When Andrew asked, Neil just brought them straight to the museum. Aaron didn’t understand it, but it seemed that Neil really had come back here just so they could go to the science museum. It was strange. Aaron didn’t like to think about it for too long because it started to make his head hurt.

Andrew and Neil were walking around remarkably uncoupled so far, to Aaron's great relief. They walked with a few feet of distance between them while Andrew kept touching things that signs specifically told him not to and he kept looking at Neil out of the corner of his eye, trying to gauge his reaction to the place or trying to make sure he didn’t disappear or maybe just sneaking a peek at him. Neil wasn't even looking at most of the stuff in the museum. He was too busy routinely staring over his shoulder at Andrew like he hadn't gotten enough of that from watching him in the car.

Nicky kept asking Aaron questions about things he didn't understand which was most of the stuff here. Kevin wandered off to read signs and look at things on his own, but never went out of ear or eyeshot of Andrew. Nicky, who had suggested they come here, occasionally took a break from asking Aaron questions to insist they should find a bar after and Kevin was always just close enough to overhear and chime in with his agreement.

Aaron kept expecting to get kicked out of the museum with the amount of noise they, mainly Nicky, were making and Andrew's habit of blatantly touching things he was well aware he was not permitted to touch, but apparently the workers were not paid enough to care as long as Andrew hadn't actually broken anything. Part of Aaron was afraid when Andrew got too bored of being here, that he would knock something over or snap off a piece of something just to get them kicked out.

But when someone finally did scream at them, it was not a worker there. It was a woman. She was about their age and staring right at them as she called out the name, “Alex!”

Aaron didn't realize what was happening until she stopped next to Nicky, staring at Neil who had for some reason turned in reaction to the name.

_I’ve been there before._

“Is that really you?” The girl asked with a laugh. “You look different.”

And then she blanched as if she realized how that must sound considering the scarring all over Neil’s face. Probably, she meant that he’d had different hair and different eyes and worn out clothes that they hadn’t yet coaxed him out of wearing every day back when she had known him by a different name.

“What happened to your face?” She said, then let out a nervous laugh when she realized what she had said. “Sorry. Don’t answer that. It’s been…”

She trailed off as if she was trying to remember when she had last seen ‘Alex’.

Neil looked a little uncomfortable and Aaron wondered if Alex had just disappeared overnight like Neil had more than once. He was surprised to find himself relieved that Neil hadn’t truly disappeared on Andrew the way he probably had on this girl. Aaron wasn’t used to being relieved that Andrew had Neil. This trip was starting to make him uncomfortably comfortable with Neil being with his brother.

Andrew wasn’t moving closer to Neil to mark his territory. He was just standing exactly where he had been already with his hands in his pockets, watching her with his usual unreadable expression. Neil shifted a little bit closer to Andrew though as if he wanted the woman to know that he was taken even if Andrew didn’t seem all that concerned about it.

Nicky looked delighted by the entire turn of events. He kept looking from the girl to Neil and back at the girl again with a shit-eating grin on his face. For someone who had been so sure from the second Neil arrived on campus that Neil had no interest in women, Nicky sure looked fucking smug that this woman from Neil’s past seemed interested in him.

She still hadn’t figured out how long it had been when Neil shrugged and told her, “We moved. It was a short notice thing.”

“Must have been very short notice,” she commented and for a moment the smile on her bright red lips faded away and then it came back again as if it had never left. “Well, if you want to catch up now that you’re back, we could go get a drink.”

Nicky brought a hand up to his mouth to cover up his laughter. Kevin was still ignoring them all. Andrew looked just as indifferent as he did to everything else this woman said. Neil shifted even closer to Andrew and moved a hand into the space between them.

Andrew looked down at the hand for a long moment while Neil insisted, “Actually, we’re only in town for the day.”

Neil was still holding his hand out. Andrew was still staring at it.

“Oh, well then I guess we’d better catch up tonight,” the girl said. She was surprisingly determined. She and Alex must have had quite the romance.

Andrew glanced at Neil out of the corner of his eye. Neil still left his hand there.

“I don’t think we’ll have time,” Neil said and then shrugged. “We have a busy schedule.”

With his back still turned to them, facing a sign he had been reading, Kevin made some huffing sound under his breath that was probably because he was still bitter at the complete lack of schedule on the trip. Kevin had been trying to enforce his own schedule on them, waking whoever had the misfortune of sharing his hotel room up bright and early when he got up before dawn to go for a shower.

Andrew took one of his hands out of his pocket and dangled it in the space between him and Neil, not quite touching Neil’s fingers with his own. His expression didn’t change. Neil didn’t move his hand or arm at all.

“Oh, okay,” the woman said. She sounded like she was trying and failing to hide her disappointment. Although she was still smiling, her features lost some of the brightness they had held a moment ago. Brightness she had for some reason felt for Neil Josten, or as she knew him Alex. “That’s too bad.”

Andrew’s arm was moving again, subtly closer to Neil’s until their hands were practically touching. Aaron watched in surprise out of the corner of his eye, and tried to pretend like he wasn’t watching, as Andrew interlaced his fingers with Neil’s.

None of them said a word until the woman had already left and when someone did speak up, of course, it was Nicky.

“You couldn’t have let her down easy?” He asked.

“I did let her down easy,” Neil insisted. Aaron had to admit, to himself and not out loud of course, that it had been much less brutal than when Neil had turned down Marissa.

“Sure, but you couldn’t have let her down easy when we were already at the bar?” Nicky asked. “Now we’ve got to avoid every bar in town in case your ex-girlfriend happens to be there.”

He said that last part as if it was the greatest tragedy they had ever faced. Nicky’s tone was overdramatic, but then again it would have been nice to stop at a bar before finding a hotel.

“What was her name, anyway?” Nicky asked in an amused tone, his spirits somehow lifted again already. “This old girlfriend of yours.”

“I don’t remember,” Neil admitted.

“Apparently, you left quite the impression on her,” Andrew said. Then in that deliberate tone of his that Aaron was all too familiar with, he added, “I thought you did not have time to swing while you were on the run.”

“I didn’t,” Neil said. “I kissed her once, faced hell for it, and we left town the next day.”

“I can’t believe you kissed a girl,” Nicky said in disbelief, as if kissing a girl was such a taboo thing and as if he hadn’t told them all of how he had used to kiss girls to try to appease his parents.

“It wasn’t worth it,” Neil admitted.

Andrew was watching Neil out of the corner of his eye as if he didn’t want to be caught staring right at him, even though their hands were still interlocked between them. Neil turned to look at Andrew and they stared at each other for a moment before Andrew glanced away.

Aaron didn’t understand what that look was, but it only lasted a minute anyways before Kevin walked over and interrupted it. Apparently, Kevin had been listening to more of the conversation than he had appeared to since when he wandered back over, he shot Neil a look and said, “Alex?”

“Shut up.”

* * *

“I told you this would happen,” Kevin insisted as if it helped the situation at all to point out that he had warned them. He would almost seem smug as usual if it weren't for the horrified look on his face.

Aaron didn't know what he was so horrified about. He wasn't the one who was guaranteed to be stuck sharing a bed with two other people. Aaron was because, once again, Aaron was getting fucked over for being small.

The hotel they were staying at only had one room left when they got there. One room with two beds. There were no cots left. They had checked.

Kevin had even tried to bribe the workers into making another room or cot or _something_ appear, but they’d had no such luck. So now they were left with five people to split between two beds.

“Maybe Neil could go sleep over at his ex-girlfriend’s place,” Nicky suggested with a laugh. “If he can remember her name to look her up.”

“Shut up, Nicky,” Neil complained and threw a pillow at Nicky’s head that Nicky neatly dodged.

“Can you throw another pillow?” Nicky asked. “I like to sleep with two and that one hit the floor.”

Neil groaned and ignored Nicky while Nicky smirked like he had said something hilarious.

Andrew and Neil were sharing a bed. That much was obvious. Kevin and Nicky were sharing a bed. Aaron was stuck either sharing a bed with the two giants or with his twin and his twin’s boyfriend. What a lose-lose fucking situation.

Aaron didn't want to share with Kevin. There was almost no room left over with Kevin and Nicky already in their bed and Kevin was known to have nightmares and thrash around in his sleep. Aaron didn't need to get smothered in his sleep or bruised up and knocked out of bed. He couldn’t believe it, but he would rather share with Andrew and Neil.

Aaron changed into his pajamas in the bathroom and came out to find that Andrew and Neil were already in one bed and Nicky and Kevin were already in the other. Kevin was reading and Nicky was complaining about the fact that Kevin was reading when he wanted to turn the light off. Thankfully, Neil and Andrew were just lying there trying to sleep. Andrew was on his back and Neil was lying on his side facing Andrew, although there was still clear space between them.

Aaron hesitated a moment, then headed over to Andrew and Neil’s bed while actively ignoring Nicky’s request to help try to snatch Kevin’s book out of Kevin’s hands.

“Move over,” Andrew said to Neil before Aaron had the chance to say it to either of them.

Neil shifted closer to the other edge of the bed, surprisingly without complaint. Andrew moved closer to him, leaving a small space between him and Neil and a larger space on his other side for Aaron.

Aaron got into the bed and didn’t have an overwhelming amount of space, but at least he didn’t have anyone touching him and at least Andrew and Neil weren’t spooning or worse in the bed they had to share.

Aaron lay with his back to Andrew, which unfortunately meant his front to the light that was still on and to Nicky and Kevin and their bickering.

“Shut up and turn out the fucking light,” Andrew said.

That put an abrupt end to Nicky and Kevin’s prolonged debate as suddenly Nicky moved back onto his own side of the bed and Kevin grabbed his bookmark to put back in his book. Nicky made himself comfortable and Kevin set his book on the bedside table and a moment later the light was off.

There was a shuffling sound as Kevin made himself comfortable and then it was blissfully silent for about thirty whole seconds.

“Hey, Aaron?” Nicky said from the other side of the room.

“What?” Aaron groaned out. He was sure that whatever this was, it was not important enough that Nicky needed to interrupt Aaron’s attempt to sleep for it.

“I thought you weren’t even going to sleep in the same _room_ as Neil and Andrew.”

“Fuck off.”


End file.
